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Overview

After a rancorous three-year legal battle with their label Unicorn, which prevented them from releasing any new material, Black Flag binged in the mid-'80s, releasing a flurry of records that had even the most devoted fans scrambling to keep up. They did, however, start this period somewhat inauspiciously with My War, a pretentious mess of a record with a totally worthless second side. Featuring three tracks of slower-than-Black Sabbath muck with Henry Rollins howling like a caged animal, it was self-indulgence masquerading as inspiration and about as much fun as wading through a tar pit. Side one, however, was quite good, with the title tracks especially intimidating.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This record gets sh*t on so much, just like the reviewer from the AMG who called it 'muck' and '...self-indulgence masquerading as inspiration'. That guy obviously doesn't know what inspiration is, because side 2 was NOT about inspiration as much as it was about brutal rage and anger. They let loose with fury, not some inspired thought process. Punks especially hate the Henry Rollins era - which was 70% of their output - because they think he changed the band somehow. Greg Ginn WAS Black Flag, not Henry Rollins. Henry fit the music Greg made, like it or not. So what if they slowed the tempo up some, experimented with time signatures, or wrote less angry songs as they went on. Punks are idiots who don't appreciate any band/musician that doesn't write songs about how they hate the government. The best punk bands ever were American, not British. Those bands couldn't hold a candle to our 80-86 period. Crying about war, the poor, and the gov't is old, rehashed, and lame. Besides, they were sissies. Whine, whine, whine. If you don't like Black Flag after 'Damaged', then so be it. That just means you don't really like the band and I'm sure that they can live with that.

This SST EP captures Black Flag in three intense live moments. Henry Rollins sounds enraged,
and the band teeters constantly on the verge of musical collapse. Although true fans will still insist that Black Flag had sold out long before ...

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Highbrow humor was never a signature of the Descendents, but the toilet-themed album Enjoy is
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While the sound collage of Negativland's first three studio albums pointed toward the band's ultimate
direction, they were really rough sketches compared to Escape from Noise. Escape is a full-on audio assault, more musical than ever, but with tight and ...

Spot -- SST's house producer who manned the boards for Zen Arcade and New Day
Rising -- didn't produce Flip Your Wig, Hüsker Dü's second album of 1985, and the difference is immediately noticeable. Everything on Flip Your Wig is ...

This four-song EP was released three years after the breakup of Black Flag. Its four
previously unreleased tracks are good medium- and fast-tempo performances by the band's lineup of 1984-1985, Henry Rollins on vocals, Greg Ginn on guitar, Kira on ...

Hot on the heels of the live record came Loose Nut and In My Head,
which showed significant improvement over My War and Slip It In. Henry Rollins and Greg Ginn were exploring by-now standard lyrical themes: hate, paranoia, loneliness, ...